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Liberalism's Tragic Soul

When I was in seventh grade metal shop, my teacher, Mr. Taylor, announced that only two students were going to be allowed to weld, the rest of us would be using the metal bending equipment, mills, and other steel working machinery to build our projects, but these two students would be welding them together for us.

It seems to me having some introductory welding experience would be a reasonable part of a metal working curriculum and all the students should have been introduced to the art, but I digress...

Our class only had two slots for welders and the teacher was looking for volunteers. When one of the students in the back pointed up front to where I was sitting and suggested the kid sitting next to me would be a good welder, Mr. Taylor, pointed to me and laughed, "That little guy, that's ridiculous."

Earlier in the year, this venerable instructor had explained to us the tenure system and how he had arrived at the highest pay grade, $35,000.00 a year. After the "little guy" comment which I probably took way too personally, I could only think - one way or the other I am going to figure out how to make in a day what you make in a year... moron.

Working and building a tooling business, I certainly have attained metal working skills far beyond anything good old Mr. Taylor could have conceived and I make a decent living as well, but the point is, I took this negative comment and turned it into a powerful driver in my quest to succeed.

I was not going to go home to tell my dad what a jackass my teacher was, his response would not have been sympathetic. I had already been programmed to believe that I could succeed and who in the hell was some teacher to pass judgment on my ability or capacity? The fact is, due to my programming, if anything, Mr. Taylor's comment only inspired me, and any inclination toward capitulation I may have embraced because of any perception I may have made, because of someone else's perception of me would have been looked down upon by my father.

And so it is the soul of conservative thought: Anyone can become anything they desire... detractors be damned.

This idea, that America guarantees such lofty possibilities, has been a reoccurring theme in my columns and really more than any other has been the theme I have embraced to guide my life. Recognizing this anyone can... theme an intimately entangled foundational principle integral in our founding documents and integral to the creation of this nation; it is hard to understand any philosophy contrary to it.

No matter how foreign such ruminations are, if we are going to continue to drive public policy forward and maintain the good prosperity for future Americans that past Americans have enjoyed, we need to engage and understand prevailing philosophies contrary to these important core beliefs.

It is very difficult to take the ideas of liberalism, socialism, and ultimately communism (where communism is liberalism's totalitarian evolution to utopia where definitive government power is forced upon the population) and reconcile it with any of the initiatives created by our fledgling nation at her founding.

Liberalism cannot be intellectually resolved with any sensible thought, it is only resolved by feeling, and it quickly falls apart upon event the slightest examination.

As a philosophy, liberalism says, "Anyone who has become anything has acquired it through theft, luck, deceit, or some other inauspicious method; but importantly, government must always act as a scale to right theses wrongs that manifest themselves as success."

It is virtually impossible to debate this philosophy with its adherents because it is such a dark and negative ideology no one will ever admit it to be their belief. A Wikipedia search will tell you Liberalism emphasizes individual rights, equality of opportunity, and guarantees freedom of thought and speech, all venerated attributes of our Constitution, and all attributes those adherents who lean politically to the right want to conserve.

Further investigation of Wikipedia and the term Conservatism will reveal a liberal's view of conservatism; that it has no ideology, but that it is only tied inflexibly to outmoded ideologies of the past. I suppose that is accurate if you believe Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, Franklin, and others, gave us the outmoded ideologies of freedom of speech, religion, and the tumultuous inalienable rights that no man or government can claim authority over.

If however, you believe freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution are timeless concepts irrespective of modern technology or prejudice then you must recognize that conservatism ventures to maintain and protect these concepts that are over two hundred years old, and that any liberal interpretation of these concepts is a movement away from them.

The question rising of course is, a movement to where?

To more central authority - less individual freedom - toward socialism - and to communism.

There is no other possible outcome, societies embrace and revere freedom or they evolve away from it.

So how is it we understand the liberal policy makers who promise government will take care of us when all evidence shows that such attempts have been to the contrary?

Johnson's Great Society, imagined to assuage white guilt, only indentured Black Americans to a heritage of dependence and surrender reaffirming the slave era presumptions that black men and black women were something less, something requiring need in the form of government assistance.

Black America (like all of America) is in need of something; it needs opportunity, it needs optimism and imagination, it needs challenge, and it needs the uplifting and inspiring foundations of character which come when people exert their will to accomplish tasks which create value, all things promised by liberal talk, but taken away by liberal action.

If liberal policy were to accomplish the goals it sets, people would be helped, people would need less government and government would shrink, yet all liberal policies, health care, housing, welfare, etc. always require more money, bigger government, and higher taxes. Do we then recognize that these policies do not work? That never seems to be the case.

To become intimate with the spirit of liberalism we cannot do it by investigating the philosophy that will never adhere to any foundational principles, but the proponents of these so-called philosophies.

It is not what liberal thinkers believe about others which guide them, it is what they believe about themselves.

Anyone can... is not primary to his or her intellectual make up.

Anyone can't... I can't... I did because I was lucky...

These are the foundational principles which rule and prejudice liberal thinking.

Meanwhile, some young inexperienced kid who accidentally acquires a role in America's next big blockbuster and becomes a multi-millionaire at a very young age embraces this liberal ideology which taxes people over half their earnings, professing things like, "I got back over a million dollars in tax money because of Bush's tax cuts, is that fair?"

At the same time, some guy in his fifties who has spent more than three decades building business struggling to provide for his family gets taxed at the same rate, making less than a tenth taken home by action-hero boy for three months work. Then liberals label the struggling businessman a selfish prick because he does not want to give the government a couple of hundred grand... and he still cannot afford to send his kid to Harvard.

The next time you get into an argument about freedom with a liberal, the freedom they profess to defend, the freedom that conservatives venture to usurp with their fascist beliefs, ask them what freedom they are talking about. Is it the freedom to possess firearms to protect ourselves if government fails to, or the freedom to keep most of the money we earn, or the freedom to speak candidly about religion, or the freedom to provide the best for our families; or is it the freedom to hand our lives over to some elected official where he will decide what is best for us, where he will provide for our retirement, where he will provide our health care, where he will present us with our opportunities and our possibilities, and where this government "servant" will pay for it all by threatening our fellow citizens with prison terms for not handing over half of the money earned through their own diligence, sweat, and toil?

When you do not get an answer, you will have come face to face with liberalism's tragic soul.

This column was inspired by a spirited conversation I had with a guy responding to my column #49 "Get in the Peace Pool." Following is my final comment which I thought interesting enough to include here:

David,

The stock market crashed and started a bad recession in 1929, the worst years of the depression were the mid 1930's after FDR had been able to apply some of his earliest policies.

As for destroying pigs, you do not need to think about it very hard, people are hungry, pigs feed people, give them the pigs. Liberals love to suggest the economy is complicated and our country's social problems are complicated and conservatives are just dolts who cannot understand the complexities of our time. I know guys with MBA's who are terrible businessmen and they think they are smarter than everyone else, meanwhile, my barely graduated high school buddy who runs a small business with nothing more than common sense makes ten times more money than MBA guy.

Any time some politician says "complex" or "complexities" you can be sure he is lying to you, and obfuscating his real goal - socialism (government control).

As far as FDR and FDIC is concerned, we can point to any of our presidents and find some good or bad in their policies (Jimmy Carter may be an exception), the point is what ideologies do they represent in a broad manner and want to promulgate, and do these ideologies secure freedom or do they subjugate freedom.

Conservatism (not Republicanism - No one is more disappointed with George W. Bush, or our Governor here in California than real conservatives) is the ideology that most attempts to protect the legacy of freedom and liberty set down by our Founders - not liberalism. You never hear conservatives refer to the Constitution as a "living document" or "outmoded", only leading scholars from liberal or progressive persuasion.

Finally, you are victim to the liberal propaganda which suggests CEOs are big all controlling evil despots who can set policy and control the population at their whim. CEOs in a truly capitalist society are the biggest slaves of the planet. They are enslaved to the whims of the market - to you and me. Government's task must be to insure the free market works so these CEO's do continue to answer to "We the People" by providing the goods and services that we want. It is when government meddles through subsidies and arbitrary controls that allows (or demands) CEO's to sidestep the consumer - and court the politicians who control these policies, which encourages corruption.

Remember, bureaucracies are not rewarded by solving problems; they reward themselves by promoting themselves, which they can only do by finding new problems that gives reason for their existence.

Suggesting you and I have some sort of control when our representatives happen to be in power is na´ve, we have control when we get what we want by controlling prices in the market with our pocketbooks.

If you really think these big CEO's have all this power and control, how have GM and Ford, stalwarts of their industries been taken over by a little sh*t like Toyota who did not even ship their first car here until the mid 1950's?

Freedom and Liberty are conservative concepts and will never be outmoded. Liberal concepts are concepts which suggest government can decide for you and I better than we can decide for ourselves and these ideologies can only evolve to communism and totalitarian government control.